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By Damallie Nalukwago
What is little understood generally is the importance of operations in brand building. The perception seems to be that brand building is about logos and fancy advertising. That is only part of the story.
The components of a brand are building awareness, creating favorable associations and ensuring positive customer experience. When these are done well and consistently, brand loyalty is built, leading to more sales, through repeat engagement and customer referrals.
The company’s marketing and communications function ensure the first two – building awareness and creating favorable associations, but it is Operations function’s day-to-day interactions with customers that can ensure a positive experience.
Imagine you have heard all these good things about a product or service and when you eventually experience it, the staff are cold, and the service is poor. It would be an anti-climax
The turnaround of PostBank over the last five years has cemented this thesis in my head. Five years ago, PostBank was a credit institution. Rising to a full-fledged commercial bank meant our service would be measured against our peers, most of whom are foreign companies with long experience in the industry not only locally but also globally.
There has been a rebranding evolution intended to strengthen the brand identity by ensuring that the visual assets accurately reflect the brand’s values and positioning. This includes logo transformation, an overhaul of the ambiance in the banking halls among others.
Anecdotal evidence abounds but surveys have shown that the customer experience has improved markedly over the last five years. It would not be farfetched for the Operations function to take some credit for the doubling of revenues, tripling of profit in resonance with our new strategic objective and purpose of fostering prosperity for Ugandans.
The lessons we have learnt, that can be applied everywhere are many but let me just highlight a few;
Marketing and branding will draw in the customer, but it is the user experience that will keep them coming back to your brand. Customer experience builds long term loyalty. We know that it is more expensive to attract new clients than to keep the existing ones and therefore it makes sense to keep improving your customer experience over trying to attract new clients. This good experience will lead to referrals and is a cheaper way of attracting customers.
In this day and age, it would be criminal for any business not to have a digital transformation strategy. Digitization increases productivity and improves efficiencies. For instance, we have reduced the wait times for our services from weeks to minutes, like in the case of providing ATM cards to our customers.
Digitization does not mean that human interaction should be ignored. In fact, whereas we have depopulated our banking halls, we have shifted more of our frontline staff to customer care and others to the back office, to deal with the more complex transactions.
With that said, the massive processing power that comes with automation means it is now possible to better personalize the customer experience. Every interaction with the business is a data point unique to each client that can be mined to improve the customer experience. Now more than ever, businesses can discern seasonal patterns of their clients and build predictive models, to serve the client better.
Speaking for the banking sector whose services people have been slow to adopt over the years, trust has been an issue, because people did not know how to relate to faceless institutions. Most of the unbanked population have doubts about the safety of their money in banking institutions. Building trust has been key in allaying these fears. One way of building trust is through investing in training financial literacy programs. In so doing, clients can see that the companies or institutions have their best interest at heart.
More importantly, the brand building function must work hand in hand with Operations function, especially in these times of fast communication. We cannot operate in silos—the left hand must know what the right hand is doing, constantly and intimately. This is the only way operations can fulfill the brand promise and assume their central position in the company’s brand building efforts.
Damallie Nalukwago is the Head Operations & Services at PostBank Uganda